Search help

Searching the Virtual collection of Asian Masterpieces can be done in four steps.
Of course if you're happy with the results after the first step, you don't have to follow the other ones. But if your query results are not satisfactory, or if you want to know how to do specific searches or generic browsing, this help section may be of interest to you.

The VCM Search facility offers five search fields to search the collection of masterpieces. These five fields, immediately to the left of this text, help you to zoom in on parts of the collection that you want to explore, or to find a specific masterpiece by making your query as explicit as possible.
In the Free Search field you can enter any search term you want: bird, lacquer, angklung, Gandhi, or any other term you might be interested in. When you click on the 'Find'-button, the system will look for exactly that term throughout all records in the Masterpiece database. This allows you to specifically search for this one Masterpiece you are looking for. E.g. searching for the term Phra Malai will give you one Masterpiece as a result.
The four other fields all allow you to filter on an information category: on a specific museum, on object type, on region or on period. When you click on the grey button to the left of any of these filter categories, a drop-down list will open. You can scroll through this list and select a term to add to your query. Once you've selected a term in one of the filter categories, the system will immediately filter on this term and show you only those Masterpieces that match it.
Remember that the filter remains active as long as the filter term is displayed in the filter field. You can deactivate a filter by clicking on the grey button to the left of it, scrolling to the uppermost (empty) line and selecting it.

By default, the results of a query will be displayed as thumbnail images on the lightbox, sorted in the order of the identifiers of the Masterpiece records. The 'Searching for'-box displays the free search term (or combination of terms; see 'Using the Search fields') used in the query, or displays 'all objects' if no free search term was used. Underneath this box, the total number of search results is shown.
If the number of results exceeds the nine available places on the lightbox, you can now browse through the result set by clicking on the 'Next' and 'Back' button underneath. In the dark grey bar underneath he lightbox you can see which part of the result set is shown, e.g. 'Results: 19 to 27 of 122'.
There are two options to change the display mode:
- you can change the sorting order of the result set: click on the button to the right of the field 'Sort on', and select another sorting criteria (title, period, region or museum name)
- you can switch from lighbox view to list view by clicking on the button. In list view, a maximum of 20 results will be displayed per page.

If the total number of results of your query is too big, you may want to zoom in on your result set. This can be done in several ways.
- In the Free Search field you can add a search term
- You can switch on any combination of Filter fields
- You can combine free search terms with the use of filter fields.
Please note that the switch 'Combine with previous query' has a default setting of 'Yes', which means that the records will have to meet all the criteria that you've selected in this query and in the previous one. It is advisable to add one search criterium at a time.

Clicking on one of the thumbnail images on te search page will bring you to the Masterpiece details page. This page offers some extra features worth exploring.
- The zoom function is available by clicking on the panel on top of the image. It allows you to zoom in/out on the image of the Masterpiece, to select a specific area of the image to zoom in on, and a 'pan' function, enabling you to move around over the surface of a zoomed in image. The '+'-symbol next to the pan-function opens up a popup window, in which you can zoom in/out in full screen mode. Ufortunately the Zoom function is only operational in Internet Explorer at the moment).
- There may be more images available for a Masterpiece. These extra images will be shown an small thumbnails above the dark grey line. You can explore these images by clicking on them.
- Some of the information details on the right hand side of the page are clickable fields: when you move the mouse over them, you can see the cursor change into a hand with a pointing finger. If you click on one of these fields, a query will be launched and the result of this query will be shown on the Search page.